Turkish Wedding
Sunday, August 7th. It’s 11 am in a barber’s shop on the Asian side of Istanbul and a man is beating my ears with a flaming ball of cotton.
Summer, her family, and I are in Turkey for the wedding of their old friend Ozgur, a foreign-exchange student who stayed with them fifteen years ago and never lost touch. As honored guests, Summer’s dad and I have been invited to join Ozgur, his dad, his brother-in-law, and his best man at the barber’s for the traditional shave and haircut on the morning of the wedding.
Going to the barber is still a regular male ritual in Turkey. There’s one on every street in residential areas, the profession often passes from father to son, and the local barber is a counsellor, gossip-monger, and tipster. It’s a lost art in the U.S., perhaps because American men are more willing than Turks to go to the same place that women go for a haircut, eliminating the need for two local businesses devoted to depilation.
Our loss. The language barrier means no therapy for me today, but the barber soaps my face as if he were painting it, strokes it clean with a cut-throat razor, trims my nose hair, beats the hair off my ears with the previously mentioned burning wad of cotton, applies after-shave, washes, cuts, and styles my hair and finally massages my neck and shoulders. It’s positively metrosexual.
There is just one problem. I had requested the same hairstyle that I walked in with. I do not know if the barber scoffed at this attempt to constrain his creativity, or if Ozgur’s translation was "he says he wants to look like David Beckham," but the man has teased, feathered, and waxed my hair into a Turner seascape. And there’s enough wax to break any comb I try to fight it with. The Turks seem to like it. Summer’s dad smiles the smile of a man who is for once happy to be almost bald.
***
Turkey’s rigorous separation of church and state makes the U.S. look like a theocracy. In America, most marriages are conducted by ministers of one religion or another. Religious ceremonies are common in Turkey, but they have no legal standing. Every couple must go through a civil ceremony. Ozgur and his bride Endam have chosen to hold theirs at the equivalent of City Hall, where there are weddings taking place roughly every twenty minutes today.
Outside, thousands of guests mill around, waiting for their cue. Up to five hundred people attend each ceremony (O&E have invited that many to their ceremony, and three hundred or so to the reception afterwards, about average for a Turkish wedding). A digital display above the entrance to the theater shows the schedule: which wedding has just taken off, which is now boarding, and which one is circling the airport.
Inside, the bride and groom sit next to each other behind a long and imposing conference table, along with the witnesses and the officiant, all facing out towards us, five hundred guests arrayed in comfortable theater seats. It looks exactly like a press conference for the signing of a peace treaty or trade agreement. The bride and groom are forming an alliance, the officiant is the Norwegian or American honest broker, the witnesses are the U.N. observers, and we are the press, our cameras flashing every few seconds. It may sound brief and formal, but it’s actually joyous. Summer’s dad is one of the witnesses. The officiant asks him a long question in Turkish and he nods sagely and speaks the only Turkish word he knows: "Evet" (Yes). Five hundred people laugh and applaud.